How to have a successful day at work

There are tons of blogs, infographics, and free training floating around the internet on how to hack your productivity, manage your time, and generally have the most successful day you could possibly imagine. The great thing about this is that it means that you can choose to have a successful day in pretty much whichever way you want — after all, it’s your business, you decide how to run it. That being said…

A successful day is based on a goal.

It’s easy to get distracted with the freedom of running your business, or to spend time focused on doing things without really having a clear purpose. So whatever your business is, make sure that you do specify a goal for each day so you’ve got something to aim at.

But be careful not to go too far the other way either — piling 100 things onto your to do list isn’t going to make you more productive; it’ll just make you overwhelmed. Try sticking with no more than three big goals for each day to keep yourself motivated and focused.

You don’t waste time on meaningless tasks on a successful day.

Whether that’s filling out forms yourself when you should just hire a VA, filing paperwork, or transferring data, there’s always going to be some task in your business that’s a time suck. In fact, we found that small British businesses waste a full working week a year processing payments to suppliers!

While we’ve sorted out the whole processing payments thing for our Clear Books users by our integration with Cash Flow, the other issues are on you. So remember, time is just as valuable an asset as money — spend it wisely.

You enjoy the ends or the means. (Ideally both).

OK, so you might not enjoy everything you do in your business, but you should enjoy the end result. Or if the end result isn’t what you want it to be yet, you should definitely make sure that you’re enjoying the work. Otherwise, what’s the point of doing it at all?

If you’re not enjoying the work or the results of your business, don’t just try to push through it — take a step back and figure out where things are off, fix that, and then you’ll be able to move forward so much faster.

You might not realise that a particular day is a successful day while you’re in it.

Doing great things takes time and commitment and working day after day on something, often without seeing an immediate return. This means that you may not even realise it when you’re in the day when you first come up with the idea that will change it all, or when you take the call from someone who has an interesting project that ends up becoming your passion.

Remember, most “overnight” successes are years in the making, so don’t discount the seemingly “normal” days as failures — you never know how things are going to work out.

What does a successful day look like in your business? Tell us below in the comments!

Posted by Tom Smith

Thomas joined the team in April 2014 as a Digital Marketing apprentice. He likes Clear Books because the company is young, dynamic and has a great atmosphere.
On weekends he can be found watching films or down the pub with mates.